


Tidal Motion

by toocoolforbeth



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Jewish Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Character analysis fic kinda?, F/M, Kid Fic, Memory Fic, POV Second Person, Platonic!Climon is there a lot, Reflective fic, Simon needs a hug, Simon-centric, Sizzy is there but not really focused on, but it ends good, but not really just mentioned a bit towards the end, kind of, non-major character death, not sure how to describe this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 15:58:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6711610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toocoolforbeth/pseuds/toocoolforbeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are born on the Sabbath</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tidal Motion

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a fic that focuses more on Simons childhood and his POV through the books. Theres no real detailed description of what happends, its supposed to be a very reflective narrative. Probably focuses more on poetic language, idk. Hope you like it.

You are born on the Sabbath, within the first few hours of a day of rest, though your mother is doing anything but resting. It is mid-July, and at a time when your mother would normally be breathing the Kiddush over the wine in the synagogue she is retching with the pain of your arrival. She feels it like bliss when you finally leave her empty and welcome your first breath of hot, moisture thick air, expelling it with a soft cry into the night a moment later. Years later, she will tell a rose tinted story of how she looked into your eyes for the first time and fell in love with you – her angel, she laughs, wistful and young with the memory. 

You grow, like all children do, and your family moves around, like many families do. By the time you are four you’ve left your mark in three apartments throughout Queens and Staten Island, before settling in a brownstone in Brooklyn. It’s small and cramped and fading but you call it home. It is here that you grow the most. It is the bright yellow cupboards of the sunny kitchen that you become familiar with, the door frame to the living room that becomes notched with the record of your growth. You spend your summers under the sweet shade of the lilac tree in the backyard, dappled sunshine falling over honey brown skin. That house becomes a part of you, and for the first time in your five years you learn to associate this pile of brick and mortar with home. 

You meet her, your Clary, not much later. You are six years old with glasses too big for your face, you sit cross legged on the brightly coloured carpet of Miss Bretton’s first grade class room. She sits, next to you, and you make a face because she’s half your size, surely she belongs in the preschool with the other, smaller children. You forget that notion soon enough. She’s a tiny, compressed bundle of energy and fire and you are enamored by all of her, from the tips of her Mary-Janes to the blue plastic barrettes in her copper hair. You quickly take each other as best friends forever and this big world seems suddenly so much more manageable with her by your side. Every day the two of you walk together, hand in hand, to the school gates; her in brand new, bright pink wellingtons and you in your sister’s hand-me-down raincoat. The two of you take on the world, a force to be reckoned with. 

Your world is golden for a time, as the worlds of most children from stable homes are. You spend your weekdays at school with Clary, exasperating your teachers and running amok. Your mother might call you an angel but you’ve a mischievous glint in your eye that keeps most of the adults in your life in an exasperated sigh, and lands you in more trouble than you might have hoped for. Despite this, your sweet disposition and rosy cheeks earn you quick forgiveness with your teachers, and your kind heart keeps you humble. Saturdays are the Sabbath, and are spent at the synagogue, either in prayer or Hebrew school and then the rest of your time is, again, for Clary. Tens upon hundreds of days you spend together, down at Luke’s farm, catching tadpoles in old jam jars down by the river and scaling the sycamore tree out the back of the property, or at each-others apartments, with sleepovers spent telling stories and playing pretend. You love her, your Clary, in the way that children love; fully and without restraint. Clary, the synagogue, the school and your parents’ house; that is your whole world and it’s small and insulated but it’s yours and you never even think to imagine something bigger.  
You could have never known that it wouldn’t last. 

Because suddenly you’re eleven years old, skinny and messy with glasses too large for your face, sitting on the couch in your family’s living room with your sister. Your father, sitting across from you, is speaking but you can’t bring yourself to process and understand these ugly, forbidden words (“metastasis” and “inoperable”, to this day you cannot say them without the sounds sticking in your throat). Maybe that’s the day your childhood ends, or begins to, because the next eighteen months are a maze of hospital corridors and a mess of strange faces (doctors and nurses and carers but you can’t tell the difference between them by this point). Your mother ages about ten years in this time, and maybe you do too, because as hard as you try you can’t find it within yourself to enjoy the same kind of innocent happiness you once lived in. You laugh, of course, and you and Clary still spend all your time together. There are still messes and mischief to get into at school and there are still sunny summer days spent at Luke’s farm, but at night you go home to your house (it’s somehow colder than it used to be, soaked in the harsh, clinical scent of medications and antiseptic) and sit at your father’s bedside, holding his hand (His skin is thin and dry, like parchment paper. You’re scared it will tear beneath your grasp). 

And then those eighteen months are over, and he dies. And you knew it was coming, had months to prepare yourself, but the day he leaves you (it’s a May afternoon, in the middle of a late spring storm) it feels like your heart is being ripped from your chest, like you can’t breathe. Your mother cries and holds you and your sister like she’s scared you’ll both slip away out of her grasp, and there’s so much pain (in that tiny hospital room, on a stormy day in late May) that you’re scared your entire being will shatter under the weight of it. But you don’t. You don’t shatter. You cry, and you mourn, and you sit with your mother at his funeral (With Clary by your side, always by your side). And the first few months are terrible. A shadow settles over that bright yellow kitchen, once sunny, and you feel a hollowness, a helplessness in your chest. Your mother stays in bed, most of the time, and you want to help her but you’re barely thirteen and hardly managing the weight on your own shoulders; you can’t take hers as well. 

It gets better. Or, at least, it gets old. You have a routine and you stick to it. Get up, make breakfast, kiss your mother (she needs you now more than ever), go to school (go to Clary), come home, eat dinner, go to bed. You centre yourself in routine. You move forward. That’s not to say it doesn’t still hurt, it does, and sometimes you miss him so much it’s like a soft, cupped fist scooping the air from your lungs like sand from a cold beach. But still you move forwards and grow and then suddenly you’re sixteen and sitting in the school cafeteria at lunch, listening to Eric go on about changing the name of your (highly unsuccessful) garage band, and it strikes you that you haven’t thought of your father once that day, or maybe all week. It comes with a mix of melancholy and sadness and relief, but it comes nonetheless. 

Eric continues, oblivious, but Clary (at your side) must notice something is off, because she nudges you gently in the side, are you okay? You nod and force a smile in reassurance, yeah Clary, I’m fine. And you are. 

And then everything happens, and the world falls apart around you. 

Clary’s mother goes missing and suddenly all those creatures and monsters you thought were imaginary (the same ones from the stories that Becky would tell to frighten you when you were children), they’re all very real, and terrifyingly close. There’s a whole new world you never knew about, and Clary is right at the centre of it (so, naturally, you are too). You meet a plethora of new, strange people; Jace and his cocky demeanour (hiding a hurt that you’re too blind to see until much later), Alec with his quiet anger. And Isabelle, unforgettable Isabelle. You are both enamoured and terrified of her and it’s almost enough to distract you from your infatuation with Clary, from the love you have misunderstood as romantic. 

You are seventeen years old. Your world is changed completely and you are transformed into something you barely recognise, and you stop ageing all together (no longer your mother’s angel, turned away from your father’s house). You become both an asset and a liability, depending on who you talk to, but either way, you find yourself with strength in a world where everything had once been stronger than you. You fight through sweat and dust and dirty river water, grasping, clawing your way through the darkness, trying so hard yet there’s this sense of helplessness you can’t shake because your friends are hurting and dying and you feel there’s nothing you can do - no dirty nails like claws, dead heart, blood in your teeth - to save them 

(You think God must be looking down on you, forgiving you, because you manage. Somehow, you manage.)

This new world is lost to you almost as quickly as it was found. The devil steals your immortality and your memories like they are nothing, and you forget them (your friends, your new family now a whisper of a dream in your deepest sleep). And then they come to you, once again, offering a world you once knew and a friend you no longer recognise. Faced with a choice, another challenge, you know it would be easy (so easy) to live in a blissful, mundane ignorance but even without your memories there is a force inside you that longs for something bigger than just yourself. So you choose a life of darkness and shadows, and pray to God that it makes a difference.   
You are eighteen years old, but your story does not end here. You leave New York in search of something that has been taken from you (you never find it, but you build something in its place). 

You are nineteen years old, and transformed for the third time. You lose a brother and part of you dies (they never said you would make it through this in one piece, be thankful for warm skin and a beating heart).

You are twenty, and in love with Isabelle. A flame burning this bright once frightened you, but now fuels the forest fire in a grieving, living heart. 

You are twenty-five years old, and you are not the same. You’re not the little boy from Brooklyn whose sun drenched world reaches only from his front door to the temple pews, but you’re not the cold, brave body in a damp cave either. You’re not even the new soldier, stepping away from the London Institute with a new name branding itself on your heart like a badge on your breast. You are Simon, and you are a surging wave. Your story didn’t end when you were eighteen, standing out the front of your old high school with a strange man and a beautiful girl you don’t recognise, but it doesn’t end here either. It doesn’t end when you are thirty-two and resting a rough hand beneath the soft, wet head of your newborn daughter, nor does it end when you are fifty and watching her leave New York for the first time. 

Your story only ends when you are eighty-four and the dying, orange sun, settled over the aching city, reflects in deep brown eyes for the last time. When your withered body, once frozen in immortality, is broken down into white ash and built in to the stone walls of the city of bones, packed inseparably alongside the rest of your family (and Clary, by your side. Forever by your side).

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading !! Comment with what you thought, and if you find any typos or glaring faults/issues pls message me and let me know. I tried to make my depictions of Jewish culture/practice as accurate as possible, but if theres any problems you find again dont hesitate to let me know :) :)


End file.
